"Just as you touch the energy of every life form you meet, so, too, will will their energy strengthen you. Fail to live up to your potential, and you will never win. " --- The Old Man at the End of Time

Sonic# wrote:I think talking to every NPC multiple times makes my fastest game time rather slow.

I'd have to dig out memory cards to see. If you mean SSSC, I'm sure I'm not under 16 hours.

This would get me as well. I even liked to go back to places I'd already been after major events to see if the NPCs said something new (they often did). It's been so long I have no idea what my playtimes looked like, but I think I still have some saves.

Y'know I've played through the games so many times, but have yet to try anything like a speed run...

I mean I've talked to every NPC so many times that I'm not actually missing anything any more. Maybe I should try one of these days, see how fast I can get through it all. I'm not too hot on low-level runs though is the only thing that would set me back -- skipping through dialogue is easy (just know who to talk to to trigger which events, and do nothing more), but it's the tactics involved in avoiding as many battles as possible, while still being able to beat the bosses, that'd be the challenge. KF

"Just as you touch the energy of every life form you meet, so, too, will will their energy strengthen you. Fail to live up to your potential, and you will never win. " --- The Old Man at the End of Time

You, um, don't know my Lunar playing style. I take notes. Hundreds of pages of notes. I record stats in spreadsheets. I compare Japanese strategy guides to what I'm seeing. And so on. This is why it takes me years. My attention span only handles about three months of this at a time. ^_^

lol, fair enough! XD With all your notes, though from the past couldn't you try a speed run if you wanted or do you lose all your notes from the past? That's genius and amazing that you record everything.

I could definitely do a speedrun if I wanted, but generally I don't want. Someday when I'm finished with my stat recording and stuff I'll be able to play through the games faster...maybe. When replaying EBC a few years ago, I got a bit bogged down in trying to figure out how much EXP characters not in the party gain. Still plan to get back to that one.

I started before it was out there, for the most part. For one set of someone else's stats for SSSC I found errors, though not many. I admit I haven't looked recently, because it's part of the interest of the game for me to see it as it happens. That's how I realized that someone must've hand-computed the TSS EXP amounts and made an error, because there's a clear pattern individual to each character of how much EXP is needed for the next level and Nash's gets off for about six levels and then back on. That probably would've been harder to spot if I were just looking at a sea of numbers. The amount of EXP Tempest needs for the next level oscillates wildly also in the higher levels. He ends up needing more EXP total than anyone else in the game to get to level 99, by far.

Someone did extract the TSS character stats from the game itself and I need to dig into those and check my own records against them. At some point in the playthrough where I decided to level everyone up to 99 and record, I gave Mia one or more permanent stat-increasing items (I didn't decide to start recording them until partway through the game). Also, I was playing on a console for that, but I later started a game on emulator and took screenshots of stats at level up and found a discrepancy after I reloaded and reached that level again. I would love to know how that happened. One of the things I do with this data is try to derive formulae for calculating each stat increase, but I generally assume that that's done ahead of time and hard-coded in.

My very first play through of TSSC was right around 32 hours. I believe having played both TSS and EB on the Sega CD games prior I kind of knew what to expect. My quickest play through last time I pulled the memory cards out was 19 hours but it's be YEARS since I've played through TSSC so I dunno if I could be quicker.

My quickest play through out of the bat was the most recent release on the PSP. I was kind of shocked how quickly I breezed through that game. Second was the GBA Lunar Legend release. My longest was without a doubt TSS on the Sega CD. I had to grind on quite a few spots and there is a point where you have to purchase a very specific item to advance. I missed the dialogue, ended up spending hours just traveling everywhere, until eventually I decided to go crazy and buy one item from every shop I could access. It was then I realized that one of the items was a quest item.

Lets not talk about Eternal Blue. I cried quite a bit when I got to Borgan on the Sega CD version. The remake was a breeze though all considering.

I feel like Lunar: Legend and Silver Star Harmony would be the easiest to do a speedrun of, mostly because of how the difficulty was almost laughably easy for both. (In LL, it was an actual challenge trying to die. And in SSH, during one of battles against Ghaleon where you're supposed to lose, I was sitting there playing that same battle for like thirty minutes because the difficulty on it was so low it didn't seem like an unwinnable fight by a long-shot... and then I had to try to lose like with LL.)

But Eternal Blue would be the biggest challenge. That had the hardest (and to me, most enjoyable) difficulty out of all of the Lunar games. Though the remake gets a few bonus points because of some of the fun things you can do with combining different extra equipment/accessories. KF